neem mosquito repellent

Your neem oil may have lot of water and maybe very little neem oil or essence

Neem is not only in the mosquito, it is a general purpose insecticide.

I have read some 30 yrs back about its use in place of the chemicals. This was field tried - the extract of the neem seeds if sprayed over the crops, it has a very strong insecticide effect on the bugs. No it does not kill, rather worse, they prefer to remain hungry and die of starvation rather than eating tose bitter leaves.

Traditionally we even burn the neem leaves to get rid of mosquitoes.

Neem oil (in soap) is a very good skin care product.

and so on. In fact traditionally we put a neem tree in the garden from the direction the breeze flows in.

And Traditionally, in India, it is said that if you eat single raw neem leaf, you will be healthy.

No body in practice follows this, thus, symbolically, on 1st day of the lunar Hindu year (Gudhi Padwa), we eat a leaf of neem tree, as a ritual.

I think partially hydrogenating your oil would work, and it should be cost effective.

Good Luck!

Tincture of benzoin is generally used as a preservative in cosmetics. You might not need it to fight spoilage in your insecticide product, since Neem oil has significant antibacterial and antifungal activity. Neem preparations are reported antibacterial for gram positive (eg Staph aureus) but not (or weakly) for gram negative bacteria (eg E. Coli). There's some data given in this abstract, about antibacterial activity at different concentrations and temperatures, that might be useful.

Spoilage with an oil product shouldn't be much of a problem anyway - as long as there's nothing aqueous mixed in. Cold cream type preparations are more prone to spoilage.

If you are looking to prepare a solid ointment or roll-on product, a little melted beeswax blended with your coconut oil-neem oil mixture should do it.

Thanks for the info. I will study the abstract.

I have also been experimenting with a blend of neem and garlic for our cows and horses. Face flies are tough on these animals. I mixed 15% unrefined neem, 2% pharmaceutical grade gralic oil, 8% emulisifer (soap) and 75% water. It works great but the garlic is certainly strong. We have alot of customers in the argiculture business and are always seeking good formulas that they might use.

You're welcome.

I can see that garlic oil might pose a problem with milk cows. The constituents that give garlic a strong odor and taste are absorbed through the skin as much as by eating, and they can affect the taste of the milk. Neem has a great medicinal profile for skin - many benign activities afaict on a quick read, so unless it affects the taste of milk it looks like a great choice for your purposes.

I don't have much personal knowledge about insect repellents, so I don't know what would be a good alternative to garlic. Now that I think of it, what about using garlic on those tags cows are often sporting attached to their ears? They use their ears to shush away flies anyway to some extent... ? Just a thought.

But I did have a nice insect repellent some years back which was made with essential oils: I used to put it on my hat brim when I was farming. Worked great, but it wore off after about half an hour though, so had to reapply pretty often. Unfortunately I don't know what was in it: it was a proprietary blend and actually smelled terrific.

I know of some great natural products for treatment of fly bites after the fact, but they're based on ethanol/water extracts rather than oils, so the extract profile is quite different. Keeping flies off in the first place is even better, though!

You could try mixing some lecithin to keep the 2 oils together.

I believe that Neem oil has a limited shelf life (6months?), so freshness of supply will be important.

My understanding is that Neem interferes with reproduction. The current generations isn't killed, but they leave no offspring. If this is so, it would probably be effective to reduce the mosquito population, but not, say, green ants (the queen wouldn't get any).

An advantage would be that it shouldn't affect the local bees, which is a serious problem with most insecticides.